Sunday, August 15, 2021

Death by Dentist (prologue to forthcoming Isamu Noguchi architectural analysis)



I was a couple months overdue for a teeth cleaning but dreaded visiting the dentist because I found out coworkers were getting very sick despite being fully vaccinated. K. was remarking more persistently I was getting stains on my teeth and they seemed to be worsening by the week. So I booked an appointment. 

Immediately after I arranged the appointment, I started regretting my decision. I got morose and asked my kids, “how will you feel when I’m gone? Are you going to miss me?”

K. said, “Stop the guilt trips. You and the kids went to the dentist in the height of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines, so why stop now?”

I replied, “but now it seems different. With all the media focusing on Delta’s high infectiousness and death toll and images of burning funeral pyres on new delhi streets… it seems like it’s more dangerous….”

“so why are you going to the dentist?”

“I wouldn’t have gone, but you kept glancing at the stains on my teeth.”

Everyone laughed nervously when I start pinning the cause of my impending demise on K’s criticisms of my dental situation. We live in dark times, and my humor is darker.

Life in times of covid means you literally put your life on the line doing the most mundane tasks that involve breathing in public. One day you’re buying roast beef at the grocery store, sending a package at the post office, eating potato salad in the park, or riding a subway, and 2 weeks later you’re intubated with an oxygen mask saying goodbye to loved ones through a hospital iPad held by strange nurses dressed in full protective gear.

To make myself feel better, I started researching the risks of going to the dentist during covid. I read in some scientific papers that dental cleaning generated aerosol water spray substantially dilutes any potential viral presence…. I got a harebrained idea that to limit my exposure to the delta variant I could alternate between holding my breath and breathing through my mouth while the hygienist was cleaning my teeth. The water mists would somehow form a protective vapor shield to guard me from airborne covid nanoparticles.

I go to a dentist who sets up atypical shop in the basement floor of a brownstone with no individual rooms. Imagine the scene, there I sat in a deathtrap with 3 other reclined patients in one living room all with their mouths gaping wide open spewing virus particles all over the place.

2 of the patients were teenagers with functioning thymuses and then there was an old guy. I started thinking of how the studies in Israel show covid vaccine protection wears off over time till it confers no prophylaxis in 6 months. if these guys were vaccinated in March then I was kind of screwed. If they were vaccinated recently, that would be better… but then again Pfizer only offers 72% protection against Delta so I was kind of screwed. the delta strain in nyc is 90% prevalent.... in my neighborhood 70% of people are vaccinated… so the chances that one was not vaccinated was 30%.... but then again, fully vaccinated people carry loads of virus as shown by 73% of partyers in Provincetown who were shedding massive amounts of virus asymptomatically thereby spreading covid around cape cod. I read china did extensive studies of contact tracing people riding trains next to infected passengers. About 30% of the bystanders sitting in close proximity were infected after the trip. But those studies were made when the wuhan strain was prevalent. So as I was trying to figure out complex actuarial statistics and probabilities of my death in my head, the dentist was scraping plaque and trying to chit chat with me like how I was doing in life, had I seen any great movies lately, and so on. 

I was kind of holding my breath so as not to breathe too much over the course of the cleaning. I answered her tersely but politely, then breathed through my mouth while the dentist water jet was causing me to gag every few minutes. i imagined the 3 other patients looking over at me choking in my dental chair, gasping for air. I was the one who looked and sounded like a covid infected patient.

2 weeks later, I somehow managed to escape the delta variant, and survive gargling and choking to death on fluoridated water to write this philosophical tale. Every day I wake up after potentially exposing myself to a deadly virus and can breathe clearly, it’s like a blessing. I have a gratitude for the small things in life. If I were thinking religiously, I would look up to the sky and thank god that I had the opportunity to clean my teeth of stains, didn’t have any cavities, and not have to visit the dentist again till next year.

Then if I start thinking like a cold hard atheist, I wonder what compelled me to go to the dentist during a pandemic in the first place? Who am I really, and what destructive force within me makes such reckless decisions like this? Some force within me just put my life on the line for a couple stains on my teeth. If I had died it would have been the worst decision of my life. Indeed, Nietzsche summed it up in his Genealogy of Morals quite succinctly

“We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people—we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? ….. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures—collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience"—which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been "missing the point." Our hearts have not even been engaged—nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself "What exactly did that clock strike?"—so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed "What have we really just experienced? And more: "Who are we really?" Then, as I've mentioned, we count—after the fact—all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being—alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: "Each man is furthest from himself." Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not knowledgeable people.”

Two centuries later, Woody Allen took it one step further in Hannah and Her Sisters and said, “Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God – I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”

We do things, we don’t know why we do them, and yet we do them over and over again.

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